8 Essential Markups for Good SEO

Posted by Berg
June 8, 2008

I recently attended the “An Event Apart” web design conference in New Orleans. One of my favorite speakers talked to us about essential markups for SEO. I compiled a list which I think every web developer should know. One of the most common requests from clients is that they want their page to “show up in Google.” These markups should help you.

  1. URL - Key words within a URL may be the single most relevant way to “show up in Google.” Say someone is searching for “chicago web design.” The site www.chicagowebdesign.com is going to have a higher ranking than www.websoulationschicago.com. Google puts high priority to keywords contained in the URL.
  2. Headings - Heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) play an important rule in SEO. Make sure any section titles are in heading tags. On top of that the lower the heading number, the more relevant it is to search engines. So, and h1 will carry more weight than an h3 tag.
  3. <strong> & <em> - Beleive it or not, search engine spider put more weight on keywords that are within <strong> and/or <em> tags.
  4. Meta Description - A meta description can have significant impact on your search engine ranking. After all it is what shows up as your description when someone is viewing search results.  One thing to note is that meta keywords are not scanned by search spiders.
  5. Alt & Title Attributes - Make sure your images have alt and title tags. Search engines can’t see images, but they can read alt and title tags. On top of that, it makes your site more accessible to the visually impared. This is an absolute must do. Dreamweaver has a helpful featgure that requries you enter an alt tag when inserting an image.
  6. Table elements: ,
    , and summary - These 3 tags are in the same boat as the alt and title tag, only these apply to tables. These tags can help your ranking and improve the efficiency in which search engines crawl your page
  7. Stylesheet - Include keywords in your stylesheet. Believe it or not this can help your ranking. Having a stylesheet named webdesignchicago.css can help your ranking more than using a stylesheet named styles.css
  8. Logo image name - Since your logo is often the first thing crawled on a page by search engine, it is important to have a filename for that logo that includes keywords.
SEO

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Comments
Comment by SEO Checklist on June 9, 2008 @ 10:44 pm

Good list, but maybe you should give your blog some SEO attention. A link like http://dsigntimes.com/?p=9 says nothing to a SERP ;-)

Comment by admin on June 10, 2008 @ 10:10 am

Touche. I’ve totally spaced on setting up my permalinks. Thanks for the heads up :)

Comment by mark on June 10, 2008 @ 10:17 am

#9 Have someone with some SEO skills look over your site to see if there is anything you missed… and make sure your site has SEO friendly URL’s.

Comment by Артём Курапов on June 20, 2008 @ 5:35 am

Looks like your editor ate table element tags on item №6

Comment by Richard on September 3, 2008 @ 7:18 pm

I don’t know if it was by mistake or not but a site named chicagowebdesign.com is showing a link back to this page. I am in Chicago and I look over different sites and checked who they were linked to, this page was one of the top ten. Funny huh!

Comment by SEO Vids on September 18, 2008 @ 9:30 pm

Great list for any seo

Comment by Henrietta Sweeney on January 9, 2009 @ 1:24 am

hi
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good luck

Pingback by One Tip a Day » Blog Archive » SEO on February 6, 2009 @ 1:41 am

[…] Markups for a good SEO How to make the best use of html tags for SEO […]

Comment by Azot on June 15, 2009 @ 4:41 am

Молодец конечно! Целиком и полностью поддерживаю! :)

Comment by Goedkope on June 22, 2009 @ 1:06 am

More SEO tips: dont use anything that uses scripts on your site, scripts need a lot of code, this brings down your keyworddensity…

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